Alliance members are working to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius by reducing emissions, accelerating action, centering equity, and tracking progress.

Explore Connecticut's policies and actions across the Alliance's 10 key policy areas. Numbers presented below only reflect the number of policies in this database and thus may not reflect all climate policies pursued.

connecticut

GHG Targets + Governance

Just Transition + Equity

Industry

Pricing Carbon + Valuing Damages

Electricity

Transportation

Resilience

Natural + Working Lands

Climate Finance

Buildings

total

Public Act No. 21-111: Establishing the Community Investment Fund 2030 Board

Establishes the Community Investment Fund 2030 Board within the Department of Economic and Community Development.

The Community Investment Fund 2030 will award up to $175 million each fiscal year for capital improvement programs, such as brownfield remediation, affordable housing, infrastructure, clean energy development, and home or public facility rehabilitation.

CT Community Investment Fund 2030

environmental_justice

CT DEEP has an Environmental Justice Program with a designated Administrator and an Outreach and Education Coordinator. The program generally assesses and respond to environmental problems in low-income and minority communities; develops strategies to increase public participation in the agency’s decision making process; identifies community health concerns in consultation with local and state departments of health.

CT DEEP Environmental Justice Program

Connecticut Conservation and Development Policies Plan

The Conservation and Development Policies Plan (C&D Plan) is a five-year comprehensive plan guiding state agency actions that affect land and water resources. Specifically, agencies must be consistent with the C&D Plan whenever they undertake or authorize grants for the following actions using more than $200,000 of state or federal funding:

- The acquisition of real property
- The development or improvement of real property
- The acquisition of public transportation equipment or facilities.

The C&D Plan is developed by the Office of Responsible Growth (ORG) within the Office of Policy and Management (OPM), with guidance provided by the  Continuing Legislative Committee on State Planning and Development . The plan is then adopted by the Connecticut General Assembly.

Connecticut Geothermal Industry Workforce Needs Assessment

In 2008, Connecticut set statewide goals to reduce statewide GHG emissions. To meet these climate goals, the state urgently needs to decarbonize its thermal sector. Geothermal heat pumps (also referred to as ground-source heat pumps, or GSHPs) are among the most efficient technologies available on the market for space and water heating. However, deployment of this technology is nascent due to cost and market barriers, including a lack of sufficient and highly trained workforce for project installations. Initial conversations about the difficulties of installing geothermal heat pumps in Connecticut highlighted that shovel-ready geothermal projects might wait months for drillers to be available, causing significant delays in project implementation. This workforce challenge is a significant barrier to increased adoption and scalability. Furthermore, although geothermal is one of the most energy-efficient space heating options available, upfront costs associated with installation and equipment are among the highest.

Workforce shortages, as well as high upfront costs, are factors that may slow the rate of wide-scale adoption. Installing a networked geothermal project involves multiple processes, and a trained, licensed workforce must exist at each step. This assessment seeks to understand the current state of the geothermal workforce across the residential and commercial sectors in Connecticut, and whether the status of training infrastructure and the current rate of growth will be sufficient to meet the growing demand for decarbonization. 

This workforce needs assessment is part of a larger project in which the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (CT DEEP), The University of Connecticut, NEEP, the Wallingford Housing Authority (WHA), and the Wallingford Electric Division public utility are using funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to explore the feasibility of a networked geothermal heating and cooling system for Ulbrich Heights, a public housing complex in Wallingford, CT.